Dr. Avijit Roy, murdered freethought blogger
Dr. Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-born U.S. citizen from the Atlanta area, was murdered Friday while on a visit to his home country. The murderers justified their actions through their Islamic religion. It’s unfathomable to think, here in the US, that someone could be murdered for their religious dissent but it happens too much in places like Bangladesh. The best way to deal with people who want to murder others because they don’t have the same beliefs is more speech and more dissent.
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November 9th is the birthday of Carl Sagan (1934-1996), an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known as creator and host of the seminal science TV show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980). Sagan was known as a skeptic and freethinker. That is why today is considered Carl Sagan Day by many in the freethought community.
A unique online conference for freethinkers, sponsored by the Freethought Blogs network, will take place July 19th through the 21st. ‘FtBConscience: Atheism with a conscience‘ will be entirely online and completely free which is unusual for freethought conferences. Although they don’t use the word Humanism, the people behind the conference support many of the ideas and principles we do, so this conference should be a good fit for Humanists in general. Check out the information and if you have time ‘attend’ the conference.
This week is ‘SSA Week’: a fundraiser for the student freethought group Secular Student Alliance (SSA). During the week bloggers and others online will be posting special content to encourage donations. The SSA does special work and needs your support to continue and expand its outreach to students across the country.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) gave a report to the United Nations detailing that Atheists, humanists, freethinkers and other non-religious people are discriminated against around the world, where expression of their views is often criminalized and subject to capital punishment. The report was in response to efforts by Islamic countries to obtain a world ban on “defamation of religion”. Freedom of Religion and freedom of expression shouldn’t be in conflict.